The present disclosure relates to an electronic circuit, a solid state image capturing apparatus, and a method of controlling the electronic circuit. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to an electronic circuit that synchronizes with a timing signal and outputs a data signal, a solid state image capturing apparatus, and a method of controlling the electronic circuit.
In the related art, an image sensor is used for capturing an image in an image capturing apparatus. For example, an image sensor including pixels, latches, drivers, amplifiers, flip flops and an output data processing unit (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2011-171889). In the image sensor, the latches are disposed in an array, and the driver, sense amplifiers and the flip flops are disposed for each row of the latches. The latch holds pixel data, the driver is synchronized with a clock signal from the data processing unit, reads the pixel data from the latch, and outputs to a sense amplifier. The sense amplifier amplifies the pixel data to provide the flip flop with the pixel data. The flip flop is synchronized with the clock signal generated by the output data processing unit, holds and outputs the pixel data. The pixel data generates images.
Unfortunately, in the above-described image sensor, there may be generated a difference between a delay time until the pixel data is transmitted from the latch to the flip flop and a delay time until the clock signal is transmitted from the output data processing unit to the flip flop. This is because circuit configurations of transmission paths of the pixel data and the clock signal (in other words, the timing signal) are different. The difference between the delay times caused by the difference in the circuit configurations (i.e., a skew) is increased or decreased depending on the conditions of a process, a voltage and a temperature. By the skew, it may be undesirably difficult to increase a reading speed of the data signal of the pixel data.